Posted
by
kdawson
on Saturday September 26, 2009 @02:34PM
from the prom-night dept.

Ant passes along a Wall Street Journal report on research that turned up a new explanation for the lifelong challenges experienced by winter babies. "Children born in the winter months already have a few strikes against them. Study after study has shown that they test poorly, don't get as far in school, earn less, are less healthy, and don't live as long as children born at other times of year. Researchers have spent years documenting the effect and trying to understand it... A key assumption of much of that research is that the backgrounds of children born in the winter are the same as the backgrounds of children born at other times of the year. ... [Economist] Mr. Hungerman was doing research on sibling behavior when he noticed that children in the same families tend to be born at the same time of year. Meanwhile, Ms. Buckles was examining the economic factors that lead to multiple births, and coming across what looked like a relationship between mothers' education levels and when children were born."Here's a chart in which the effect — small but significant — jumps out unmistakeably.

I was born in December and pursuing double masters with GPA of 3.4 is it really bad?

I was born in June, and received a Ph.D by the time I was 27, with a 3.95 GPA. Luckily for me, part of that Ph.D training involved learning that the word data is not the plural of anecdote.

It's a good thing, too, because your comment might otherwise serve as the first brick in the foundation of my claim that summer babies are caustic and monumental shitheads that seem to spend their free time in pissing matches.

Now, correlation is not causation. It's possible that the parent's strong marriage does not *cause* the child's good prospects and performance, but rather that both are caused by some of the same socioeconomic factors

I like the idea that it's actually a reverse correlation- that stupid children with poor prospects and bad grades cause their parents' divorces.